He swung around a trolley.
"Yes!"
He darted the car and looked in every direction for girls.
"Look at her!"
The air was so sweet in New Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas; and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and mud, and molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a Northern winter.
We bounced in our seats.
"And dig her!" yelled Dean, pointing at another woman.
"Oh, I love, love, love women!
I think women are wonderful!
I love women!"
He spat out the window; he groaned; he clutched his head.
Great beads of sweat fell from his forehead from pure excitement and exhaustion.
We bounced the car up on the Algiers ferry and found ourselves crossing the Mississippi River by boat.
"Now we must all get out and dig the river and the people and smell the world," said Dean, bustling with his sunglasses and cigarettes and leaping out of the car like a jack-in-the-box.
We followed.
On rails we leaned and looked at the great brown father of waters rolling down from mid-America like the torrent of broken souls – bearing Montana logs and Dakota muds and Iowa vales and things that had drowned in Three Forks, where the secret began in ice.
Smoky New Orleans receded on one side; old, sleepy Algiers with its warped woodsides bumped us on the other.
Negroes were working in the hot afternoon, stoking the ferry furnaces that burned red and made our tires smell.
Dean dug them, hopping up and down in the heat.
He rushed around the deck and upstairs with his baggy pants hanging halfway down his belly.
Suddenly I saw him eagering on the flying bridge.
I expected him to take off on wings.
I heard his mad laugh all over the boat –
"Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!"
Marylou was with him.
He covered everything in a jiffy, came back with the full story, jumped in the car just as everybody was tooting to go, and we slipped off, passing two or three cars in a narrow space, and found ourselves darting through Algiers.
"Where?
Where?" Dean was yelling.
We decided first to clean up at a gas station and inquire for Bull's whereabouts.
Little children were playing in the drowsy river sunset; girls were going by with bandannas and cotton blouses and bare legs.
Dean ran up the street to see everything.
He looked around; he nodded; he rubbed his belly.
Big Ed sat back in the car with his hat over his eyes, smiling at Dean.
I sat on the fender.
Marylou was in the women's John.
From bushy shores where infinitesimal men fished with sticks, and from delta sleeps that stretched up along the reddening land, the big humpbacked river with its mainstream leaping came coiling around Algiers like a snake, with a nameless rumble.
Drowsy, peninsular Algiers with all her bees and shanties was like to be washed away someday.
The sun slanted, bugs flip-flopped, the awful waters groaned.
We went to Old Bull Lee's house outside town near the river levee.
It was on a road that ran across a swampy field.
The house was a dilapidated old heap with sagging porches running around and weeping willows in the yard; the grass was a yard high, old fences leaned, old barns collapsed.
There was no one in sight.
We pulled right into the yard and saw washtubs on the back porch.
I got out and went to the screen door.
Jane Lee was standing in it with her eyes cupped toward the sun.
"Jane," I said.
"It's me.
It's us."
She knew that.
"Yes, I know.